TSPDT

Key Production Country: Canada
Key Genres: Short Film, Avant-garde/Experimental, Abstract Film, Documentary, Drama, Animation
Key Collaborators: Joyce Wieland

"Within both the delimited confines of the 'structural film' (as such) and the cinema today as a whole, Michael Snow's films assume an importance so awesome in its ultimate implications that whole schools of contemporary film-making pale beside it." - Jonathan Rosenbaum (Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 1980)

"The top of Michael Snow’s curriculum vitae reads, born: Toronto, Ontario, 10 December, 1929. Occupation: filmmaker, musician, visual artist, composer, writer, sculptor. As Canada’s best-known living artist, Snow is also one of the world’s two most highly acclaimed experimental filmmakers (the other being Stan Brakhage, US). Although Michael Snow practiced as a visual artist in Toronto in the 1950s, Canadian art critics as a whole only began to champion his work after he moved to New York City with his wife, Joyce Wieland, in 1962. In the 1960s, he developed a reputation for being an important innovator in the fields of Pop and Minimalist art, with his Walking Women series, and with his film work." - Peter Rist (Offscreen, 2002)

"Although he had made an isolated animated short in 1956, it was only after he moved to New York in the early 60s that he began gravitating to film as a medium of personal expression. He made New York Eye and Ear Control (1964) - now famous for its Walking Woman framing silhouette - as an extension of his complex graphic concepts and exercises with real and imagined space. He is best known for his next film, Wavelength (1967), a 45-minute zoom lens - aided exploration of pure time and space that strongly influenced the structural movement of the avant-garde and became a standard item in film school screenings. - The Film Encyclopedia, 2012

"Michael Snow is best known for his influential 1967 film Wavelength, which remains one of the landmarks of structuralist cinema… His subsequent films investigate the medium's formal possibilities and are often structured on the mechanical properties of the camera itself… Snow was never particularly interested in movies while growing up and his approach to filmmaking reflects an experimental impulse unburdened by cinematic tradition. Much of his work focuses on film's effects on perception… Though he remains known in the United States primarily for his contributions to avant-garde film, Snow has continued to work in other media throughout his career. In Canada, he is equally well-known for his painting and sculpture, and was even commissioned to make the monumental sculptures that adorn Toronto's Skydome stadium." - Tom Vick (Allmovie)

"He made films which should be seen as examinations of forms of all kinds, lines, shapes, sounds, light, grammar, sex, etc. If you can sit back and go with a Snow film, it can be an involving experience." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)

"Michael Snow’s extensive and multidisciplinary oeuvre includes painting, sculpture, video, film, sound, photography, holography, drawing, writing, and music. His work explores the nature of perception, consciousness, language, and temporality. Snow is one of the world’s leading experimental filmmakers, having inspired the Structural Film movement with his groundbreaking film Wavelength (1967)." - The Film-Makers' Coop